MOBILE, Ala. — In an otherwise dull and hackneyed race for governor of Alabama this year, one long-shot candidate has a backstory too amazing not to relate to a nationwide audience, even if the polls show him trailing quite badly.
Meet Lew Burdette. He has an impressive professional record as the chief operating officer who took Books-a-Million public and who for 19 years has run a nonprofit home for women and children fleeing domestic violence.
In person, Burdette comes across as likable and sincere. He’s not much into detailed policy prescriptions. When pressed, he says all the right conservative things about education (for school choice, against Common Core), prison reform (tough on violent offenders, better vocational rehabilitation for lesser offenders), taxes (against), and the Second Amendment (for). In a campaign so far worthy of nothing but caricatures, even Burdette’s level of real substance is the proverbial zephyr of freshness.
Still, it is an experience he had in 1974, at age 15, that shapes what seems as much Burdette’s “Christian witness” as it is a political campaign.
As Burdette tells it, he was leaving work at the grocery store his father owned in the small town of Roanoke when he was accosted by two men only a few years older than him. Pushed into a car at gunpoint, he was driven far into the countryside as his captors explained they intended to ransom him for $250,000, deliverable that very night — a sum absurdly beyond his family’s capability.
They parked on a dirt road, forced him through thick brush, and then, he said, “They struck my head with their gun, leaving a big gash and blood flowing. I was almost knocked unconscious and collapsed. After only a couple of minutes, one of the men slammed his fist into my chest. I immediately felt a sharp, piercing pain. I had been stabbed with a knife. … I rolled over, and he stabbed me in the back three more times. Blood was pouring out from all of my wounds.”
They eventually dragged him to an abandoned water well about 30 feet deep and threw him in. They then threw a bricklike material on top of him and shot four times into the well. The fourth shot hit the back of his head and ricocheted into his jaw, where he says a fragment remains to this day. His captors then left him for dead.
Burdette said that after about two excruciating hours in the cold and muck, he began reciting Bible verses his mother had made him memorize as a child. To make a much longer story shorter, he suddenly found a hole or indentation in the well wall that gave him a foothold. And then another. And another.
He somehow climbed from the well, literally dragged himself for two hours across the countryside, and found an isolated house with lights on. But as the residents opened the door, he heard the badly muffled engine of what sounded like the same car that the kidnappers had used.
Sure enough, the two kidnappers entered the house, and all he could do was yell that they were the ones who had attacked him. It turned out the house belonged to the home of one of the kidnappers’ grandmothers. Rather than cover for the grandson, the family called an ambulance for help. Doctors told his parents his chances of surviving were less than 10%. Yet, two weeks later, he walked out of the hospital.
To listen to him tell the story, which he does with exquisite aplomb, is to feel the dread and suffering in the pit of one’s stomach.
And, more, to come to believe in prayer.
What relevance it has for Burdette’s quest for the governorship is open to interpretation. Yet, like a 15-year-old repeating Bible verses to save his own life, Burdette believes. The primary is May 24, and he’ll need a political miracle to reach a runoff. Still, who is to tell Lew Burdette that miracles don’t happen?
